(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of client-server network environments such as the World Wide Web or private "Intranets," and more particularly relates to creating and maintaining a Web site in such environments.
(2) Background Art
In the so-called information age, information that used to take weeks to search and retrieve is now available contemporaneously at our fingertips. The proliferation of client-server networks such as the Internet, and in particular the Word Wide Web ("Web"), makes a large amount of information accessible to anyone connected to the Internet. Intranets, which are essentially smaller, private versions of the Web, are also proliferating rapidly as companies strive to streamline their information processing.
In general, the layout language for a Web document is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Each Web document is given a "Uniform Resource Locator" (URL) which is essentially an address path identifying the server which hosts the desired document plus the location of the document on the server. Using a browser software such as Netscape.TM. Navigator, an end-user can send a request from a client computer to access a document stored at a particular URL on a server. When the server receives the user's request, it sends the requested HTML Web document to the client where the document can be displayed. The communications protocol used in making such a request and in transferring Web documents is the "Hypertext Transfer Protocol" (HTTP). For more information about the Web, see for example, T. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau, A. Loutonen, H. F. Nielsen, and A. Secret, "The World Wide Web," Communications of the ACM, vol. 37(8), August 1994.
HTML allows any Web document to include hypertext "links" to other Web documents including graphical images. The effect of a hypertext link, is well known by practitioners of the art, is that when the document containing the link is displayed to an end-user at a client computer, the end-user can access the linked document by pointing and selecting a corresponding icon or highlighted text in the displayed document. The Web and Intranets allow not only information access, but also information publishing. To publish information, a Web site is typically created to associate HTML documents and files, which contain information for publishing. Users then access information in the form of the HTML documents and files by accessing the Web site and its hypertextual links.
Originally, Web sites were created by writing HTML text files, line by line. Then, HTML editors were created and eased some of the drudgery of writing HTML files. In both cases however, Web sites incorporating graphics and clickable icons were laborious to create because the graphics images had to be prepared in advance by graphics editing software. Consequently, users with little background in these arcane fields usually turned to graphics artists and Webmasters to create their Web sites. Hence, creating Web sites, especially graphics Web sites, has been a challenging task for most users.
Moreover, once a Web site has been created, it typically needs to be maintained and updated. This is because information is dynamic: it changes as new information becomes available. As in creating a Web site, maintaining or editing a Web site has not been a simple process of adding, deleting, and modifying information. The task of maintaining a Web site was usually relegated to a specially trained Web site administrator, also known as a Webmaster. Hence, maintaining a Web site has been an expensive, time-consuming, and labor intensive task.
Further complicating matters relate to the basic hardware configuration for the Web and Intranet, which typically exists in a client-server computer environment. In a typical client-server computer environment, the Web site is created and stored in the server. A typical user in a remote client computer cannot create a Web site to be stored in the server. The client may only access the Web site in the server by using a Web browser such as Netscape.TM. Navigator. Further, it is difficult for the typical user in a client computer to maintain a Web site stored in the server. Hence, a user with remote access to the server doesn't enjoy the benefit of being able to create and maintain a Web site.
Thus, what is needed is a method for easily and efficiently creating and maintaining a Web site without requiring knowledge of HTML in a client-server environment. What is further needed is a method that allows authoring a Web site from a client computer. The present invention provides a solution to these problems by implementing a user-friendly template-based system for creating and editing Web sites.